Everyone has their own Marsden Hartley. That happens with great painters, and Hartley was one of the greatest of 20th-century American artists. He is also a very difficult painter who needs repeated attention to be grasped at all well.

Michael Maglaras has made a film, Visible Silence: Marsden Hartley, Painter and Poet, giving us his view of this complex and important artist. Maglaras has paid a lot of attention to Hartley, having previously made a dramatic film built around Hartley’s prose poem Cleophas and His Own. It recounts the story of a Canadian fishing family he had lived with who lost their two sons and a nephew at sea, all at once. Hartley made some of his most memorable paintings about this family and their loss.

Making a film about paintings is at best a problematic enterprise. It’s in the nature of paintings in general, and Hartley’s paintings in particular, to demand that the viewer come to the painting itself, rather than a reproduction, to really complete the artistic process. Hartley’s painterly execution produces an aura that hovers around his paintings, giving them their remarkable resonance. Much of this is lost on film or any reproduction.

Paintings are also by their nature static, so they live in tension with the time-bound demands of cinematic drama. Maglaras addresses this problem with close-ups and pans, bringing our attention to those parts of the picture that fit his dramatic intent the best. Sometimes this is effective, as when he brings our attention to the symbolic solidity of the clouds above Katahdin. It can also be a little unnerving, as when he makes the arrows stuck in the eyes in the odd “Sustained Comedy” seem to be rays emanating from them.

Maglaras follows the chronology of Hartley’s life from his difficult childhood in Lewiston to his introduction to the artistic circle around Alfred Stieglitz in New York, where he first encountered Cézanne’s work. From there he follows Hartley’s path into the Gertrude Stein group of the Paris avant-garde and on to Germany where his love for a doomed German officer and for the pageantry of the Kaiser’s German army led to his first really signature works. One of the most famous is his “Portrait of a German Officer,” with its stacks of medals and uniform decorations, and containing the age and initials of his dead friend.

Maglaras discusses Hartley’s love for symbols, a predilection that set him on a different path from the main stream of modernism. He also discusses his poverty, and the fact that he stuck to his work in the face of sometimes desperate privation. Hartley’s passion for things German did very little for his popularity as an artist once World War I got started, nor did his interest in the trappings of the Nazi regime. It was not a good time to be a Germanophile or, for that matter, a homosexual.

Half-century The big 50th-anniversary exhibition at the Colby College Museum of Art has only about a month left of its eight-month run, so it seems like a good time to revisit this sprawling and worthwhile show.

Expanded within On the inside, though, it feels like a much larger museum has been magically folded into the fine old neo-classical structure.

More than words What are we to make of Robert Indiana? His is generally considered part of the Pop art group of artists who came into prominence in the late '60s, along with Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein, and though he is not perhaps as highly regarded in the art world, he has a wider popular following than any of them.

SPACE to screen video banned from Smithsonian A video banned from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery last week in the wake of threats from conservative politicians will be on view in the front window of SPACE Gallery (538 Congress St., Portland) this week and next, as part of a nationwide show of solidarity between art galleries and the organizers of the Smithsonian's show.

Maxey’s sprawling landscapes; Blackburn’s altered spaces After years of visiting her second home in her husband's native United Kingdom, Providence artist Madolin Maxey says it finally occurred to her to paint the hedgerows, rolling hills, giant boulders, and ancient stone crosses in Devon in southwestern England, where their house overlooks the River Dart as it winds northwest from the English Channel.

Hartley’s Gloucester; plus, Cristi Rinklin Marsden Hartley returned to Gloucester in 1931 like so many traditional painters making the summer pilgrimage to the city's shores and fishing wharves, except he was part of Alfred Stieglitz's Modernist circle in New York, had imbibed French Cubism in Paris and German Expressionism in Berlin, and was a friend of Gertrude Stein and Wassily Kandinsky.

Kitchen-sink ‘Summer’ You wouldn’t think a painting exhibit of ships and still lifes, landscapes and portraits, primitives and abstractions representing 82 artists and spanning 148 years would hold together in any discernible way.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM FREDERICK LYNCH AND WILLIAM MANNING | October 03, 2013 Both Frederick Lynch and William Manning are in their late 70s, both have taught others, and, more important, both have had a consistent arc over their long working careers. You can spot and identify works by either artist from a distance.

EXPLORING A MASSIVE EXPANSION AT COLBY’S MUSEUM | August 08, 2013 The Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion at the Colby College Museum of art, just opened, has added some 66 percent to the museum’s existing exhibition space, to a total now of some 38,000 square feet. With the gift of the 500 or so objects from the Lunder Collection, it means they can fill the space without breaking into a sweat.